Mini space shuttle crash-lands after free-flight test

When it comes to commercial spaceflight, we are still chasing the dream. A petite version of NASA's people-carrying space shuttle crashed during an uncrewed test in which it flew freely for the first time.

The Dream Chaser, made by Sierra Nevada Corporation of Sparks, Nevada, is one of three NASA-funded vehicles contending to replace the shuttle. None of these private companies has yet managed to send a person into space.

Sierra Nevada had previously flown the Dream Chaser suspended from a helicopter. During a similar, uncrewed test on Saturday, it released the craft from an altitude of 3.8 kilometres and allowed it to glide and land on autopilot. For the most part the flight went smoothly.

"The test we were doing was to find out, does this vehicle actually fly? Is it airworthy?" Sierra Nevada's Mark Sirangelo said during a press conference on 29 October. "It flew as if it had been flying for many years."

But trouble arose when the craft's left-hand landing gear failed to deploy. The glider touched down on its right wheel, then tilted to the left and skidded off the runway. Sierra Nevada released a video of the flight, but it ends right before the landing.

Positive spin

The team is still investigating why the left wheel failed to deploy. The computers received the commands to deploy the landing gear, so the problem was probably mechanical, says Sirangelo. According to preliminary flight data, the Dream Chaser's autonomous landing software even tried to compensate for its uneven arrival and kept the craft balanced on one wheel for longer than expected.

The vehicle did not flip over, as some watchers initially feared, and it sustained minimal damage. No critical components snapped off, and all the computers inside were unharmed and kept recording data throughout the crash. The same vehicle should be able to fly again, perhaps as soon as next year, says Sirangelo.

"In many ways we're really pleased with the way it acted," he says. "One of the things you never really know with a vehicle is how it's going to act when things go bad. It was not a good landing, but it helped the vehicle sustain the least amount of damage. That's pretty special."

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